Bakırköy Cumhuriyet Square

BAKIRKÖY CUMHURİYET SQUARE

CULTURE CONJUNCTION

Our arrivals to Bakırköy always take place in the footsteps of history ... If you come by sea, a cistern from the Magnaura Palace will welcome you, and if you come by train, you will pass through the same rails with dozens of generations and get off at the same point. Istanbul Street, where you pass by vehicle, is the two thousand-year-old Via Etnagia itself. The cognitive expression of spatial knowledge is closely related to what they carry from the past to the present and what kind of a trace it will leave for the future. This relationship between urban space and urban memory is the basic structure of the local life that connects with the urban texture. The change of life styles also shapes the spaces. This interaction paves the way for a spatial transformation and causes the relationship between individuals and space to differ. Although the project area is defined as Cumhuriyet Square and Fahri Korutürk Street, which is the natural extension of this square, we see that we are faced with a macro-scale issue when considering the cross-scale situation of the context, the history of the region, its transformation and memory codes. The proposal project is to realize the situation of Bakırköy with its history by the citizens, to make it a part of daily life and to design the area to form the backbone of a cultural route. In this context, the project area has been considered as a culture conjunction.

ACCESSIBILITY IN URBAN MEMORY TRACE

Before starting the spatial design of the project area, the accessibility fiction in the urban memory track was discussed together with the environment of the area. The proposal project is shaped over the idea of a cultural route in order to recognize and adopt the situation of Bakırköy in touch with history by the citizens and to make it a part of the normal flow of daily life. Culture Route is an uninterrupted pedestrian promenade starting from the coastal line and extending to Fildami Cistern. Ebuzziya - Fahri Korutürk Streets and Cumhuriyet Square where it comes into contact with daily life. The cultural route not only touches historical buildings and ruins, but also touches memories. In this context, the railway has been considered as an important memorial space, both as a very strong threshold that separates the square from the southern part of the city, and with its extremely strong reference in the memory of the people of Bakırköy. Train tracks make us stop. They sometimes invoke a farewell and sometimes an expected reunion. That's why we stop when we see a train, it contains a sad nostalgia in its ontology. Since the railways are uninterrupted, they give us a surprise horizon line in the dense housing stock. The land that these tracks step on is the same land people have been using for hundreds of years. In this context, the railway is the place where the cultural route is the most powerful space. This route relates to the railway in various ways. It goes down next to the railway, rises above it, becomes a platform and presents the city a viewing point overlooking the horizon.